THE LAST WHALE
It’s Never Too Late!
Protecting the oceans “From space, the planet is blue …the territory Not of humans, but of the whale” Heathcote Williams, Whale Nation What will happen, to the planet, to us, if whales disappear from our oceans? The Last Whale looks at this question and what follows from it. How can we save whales? The Last Whale follows young climate activist Abi and her AI computer Moonlight. When they discover whale song recordings made by Abi’s great-grandfather, a whale hunter, Moonlight finds a pattern in them: the songs are a map to a future that could rescue the whales and the world. Inspiration came from many sources, all of which helped shape my story. First, the whales themselves. Half my life I work as a writer, the other half for a whale conservation charity - I’ve been lucky enough to see whales up close. A 14-metre-long humpback has launched out of the water and crashed back into the waves right in front of me. I’ve watched a baby orca leave its mother, swim up to the tiny boat I was in, turn over and casually spend lingering moments looking at me. I’ve also seen dead dolphins still entangled in the nets that killed them, and spent hours on the sea searching for whales in areas where they were
once plentiful. A silent, empty ocean is the image or idea that has most haunted me. Inevitably, I was going to write my ‘whale book’ sooner or later. I tapped into my own family history. My mother is Norwegian, from Tonsberg, which was once a whaling town. Some of the mind-blowing research showing how important whales are to the ecosystem - especially for fertilising phytoplankton, which is as important as trees for producing oxygen and absorbing carbon - came into play. Whales are intelligent and awesome, the eco-engineers and gardeners of the sea and they’re giant allies in the fight against global warming. I was inspired by young ecoactivists, who are not prepared to quietly inherit a heating, polluted world. I’m often asked what impact I hope this book will have on readers. First,
it’s a story; I hope they enjoy it! If there is a ‘take-away’ message, it is one of hope and agency; that it’s not too late, that whales and the world are worth protecting and fighting for. I’ve been impressed by community projects from Sri Lanka to Colombia which are running amazing conservation projects. The ocean doesn’t belong to one people or nation, it’s for all of us and the solutions need to be driven by all of us too. The questions around how we save the whale are complex, and stories - in my view - aren’t really about delivering answers. But, if The Last Whale gets people thinking and perhaps motivates them to take a fresh look at nature, and to think about how we can share the world with whales and dolphins, then that is a good thing. CHRIS VICK Author christophervick12.wixsite.com/website TURN TO BACK TO PAGES 15 17 to read about Wetherby Prep, Kensington
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